A plea for help as bullets fly / CHP, sheriff to aid Oakland's beleaguered police as city's homicide rate accelerates

Reeling from a two-week burst of killings that has left a dozen people dead, Oakland police are calling for reinforcements while shell-shocked residents wonder whether anything can make a difference.

"It's crazy," said Oakland City Councilman Larry Reid, whose East Oakland district has seen the most bloodshed. "Sometimes I just feel like giving up, especially when folks are asking you what you're doing. . . . It is depressing.

I've lost so much sleep."

The city's death toll stands at 89 this year, compared with 80 at the same date a year ago, when the city finished with 113 homicides, a five-year high.

Since Aug. 23, the victims have included a newly married gas station clerk gunned down in a robbery and an 18-year-old former high school football star who police believe may have been killed by rivals.

About 4:45 p.m. Friday, Maurice Holcomb, 35, was shot as he sat in his parked car on the 5900 block of Herzog Street. Holcomb died later at Highland Hospital in Oakland. About 3 a.m. Saturday, another man was shot and killed on the 5700 block of East 15th Street. His identity was not released.

Like last year's homicide victims, most of this year's dead have been petty criminals who were shot in the city's poorest neighborhoods, usually over drugs or in a dispute with someone who sells drugs.

"I'm really wondering how bad it is going to get around here," said Verlon Thomas, 24, as he stood outside a Kwik Way hamburger stand on International Boulevard and 62nd Avenue. "Nothing they do seems to work."

In response to the surge in killings, Police Chief Richard Word announced that Alameda County sheriff's deputies and California Highway Patrol officers will begin assisting police in high-crime areas, particularly on weekends.

Word said he wants the extra forces to help his officers "serve warrants for wanted persons, and we will look for wanted persons, including witnesses and suspects, so that we can solve our open homicide cases."

Mayor Jerry Brown called the recent spike in homicides horrible, adding that he is hopeful more enforcement will help.

"You've got far more angry people with guns than you have cops," Brown said.

"You have thousands of people who have no job, who will never have a job, who have no intention of getting one. The only way they get work is to shoot their way into it (for drug turf). That's the Wild West scene we have in some quarters."

A year ago, as the city's homicide rate began climbing, Oakland police launched several crime-fighting measures, including closer tracking of ex- convicts just paroled from prison. The city's African American community -- particularly its churches -- held large rallies, marches and anti-violence events.

But in November, city voters rejected a series of tax increases to hire 100 more police officers and increase social services for convicts released from prison.

While slayings are escalating again this year, homicide rates in San Francisco and San Jose remain about the same as last year's. Oakland's homicide toll peaked at 175 in 1992 -- when crack cocaine use was rampant and gangs fought bloody turf wars.

The profile of Oakland's victims is largely unchanged: Most were African American males; nearly all were unemployed. Nearly half of those killed this year were on probation or parole, as were 40 percent of the 52 people arrested this year for homicide, Lt. Jim Emery said.

The city would like to hire more police officers. Because of attrition and a hiring freeze, there are about 30 fewer cops patrolling the streets Oakland now than there were at this time last year.

Councilwoman Nancy Nadel, who represents West Oakland, is exploring whether voters would back a new initiative that would hire fewer officers than last year's measure and spend more on crime prevention programs, particularly jobs for ex-offenders.

"The link between homicides and jobs is clear. Once people get caught up in the drug trade, which they do when there aren't jobs, it's a very violent business," she said.

While plans for the measure, which could be placed on the March or November ballot next year, are preliminary, it could include funding for 25 to 30 police officers to work in the city's most violent police beats and better track convicts getting out of county jail.

It would also include a job-training program for ex-offenders, followed by a one- or two-year city job -- such as gardener -- with support services such as mentoring.

But critics, including Councilman Reid, question how much job programs can help and say more law enforcement is the solution.

Young drug dealers "understand the consequences," Reid said. "They're either going to jail or they'll be taken down on the streets. These folks aren't afraid of dying. That's scary."

While Brown said he will consider Nadel's measure, he predicted it will be difficult to get voters to approve it as the cash-strapped city hits them up for more money for everything from fire prevention to libraries.

There is only so much the city can do on its own, Brown said. The courts need to sentence people to longer terms, the prison system needs to train people behind bars, and probation and parole need to better supervise them once they get out, he said.

Brown said he plans to pursue state legislation to improve the prison system.

"The police are taking people off the street but they're being put back on the street just as fast. It's a revolving door unless they end up killing somebody," he said.

Police have had some notable successes in making arrests that may have kept the homicide rate from rising even higher.

On Thursday, Joyner was among a group of officers who chased after two men in a car that streaked from East Oakland to the Berkeley-Oakland border. Police believed one of the men was wanted in Tuesday's slaying of 17-year-old Thomas Anderson at 48th and Vicksburg avenues in East Oakland.

When the men were stopped and arrested, they told police they were Anderson's friends out to avenge his death, Joyner said.

Such successes would become more common, Joyner and Word said, if officers could get more help from reluctant witnesses. Such reluctance frustrates Reid, although he knows it is tough to overcome the fear and apathy in the city's toughest neighborhoods.

"I'm waiting for the community to say, 'We're fed up' and say, 'We're not going to take this anymore,' " Reid said. "It hasn't happened yet."